The Friends of Pancho Villa

by James Carlos Blake

  A rifle shot ricocheted off the side of an outcropping over his head. That’s when he noticed a small clump of boulders at the lip of the outcropping. He grabbed up a fallen tree branch, scrabbled up the rocky incline, and wedged the end of the branch under the rocks as a lever. He said he nearly busted a gut heaving on that branch—but the boulders finally gave and went tumbling down the mountainside, crashing through trees and brush, bounding down the trail, knocking loose more rocks and pulling them along behind. Villa heard the screams of horses and the horrified shrieks of their riders as the rockslide rumbled down into them.

  His horse was all right. Pancho remounted and led Tomás’s horse on over the summit of the mountain and down into a misty forest of heavy pine. Every once in a while he stopped to listen, but he heard no sound of anyone coming behind them. “By the middle of the day, even I didn’t know where we were,” Pancho said.

  He made camp in a grassy clearing beside a rock spring. When he pulled Urbina off his horse, Tomás’s face was darkly purple from all the blood that had settled into his head—but he continued sleeping soundly. Villa picketed the horses, took a long drink from the spring, then fell asleep too.

  ‘‘When I woke up the next morning, that goddamn Tomás was still sleeping!” Villa said. “I kicked him in the leg and he sat up real fast, blinking like an owl and grabbing for his pistol. He says, ‘What? What? Are they coming? Let’s ride, Panchito, let’s ride!’ He looks all around and sees everything’s all right, so he shrugs and gives a big yawn. Then he stretches and gets a little look of pain and says, ‘Damn, I must’ve slept the wrong way last night—my ribs are sore.’ He never even asked how the hell we’d gotten from where he fell asleep to where he woke up, and the whole thing was so damn scary I never told him.’’

  •

  Two days from Columbus we came across a herd of cattle being driven by four cowboys. The cows belonged to the Palomas Land and Cattle Company, which was owned by gringos. Naturally we took the cows. Villa picked out some boys to drive them to a ranch near Colonia Dublán, whose owner would buy them with no questions asked. One of the Palomas cowboys was Mexican, so we let him join us. The other three were loud, tough-talking gringos who said their chief was quick to hang rustlers. “This is Mexico, amigo,” Villa said. “You’re the goddamn rustlers.”

  We hanged all three.

  We cut through the border fence about three miles west of Palomas and crossed into the United States. We had a small remuda with us, in case we should need the extra mounts to make our getaway. Villa and Pablo López took half the boys and headed east. I kept going north with the rest of the boys and the remuda. The plan was for me to hit the town from the west and shoot up the place, drawing as many soldiers as we could out of the camp and to the north side of the tracks. I would also seek out the Ravel brothers and prove to them the folly of treating us unfairly. As soon as Villa heard the shooting, his boys would charge into the camp from the rear, one bunch of them attacking the barracks while the rest cleared out the stables and raided the armory.

  At about four in the morning we reached a hill at the southwest end of town which provided cover for our approach and was a good spot to leave a boy with the remuda. But as we came around the hill and started toward town, a voice in the darkness demanded, “Halt! Who goes there!”

  The sentry had been hunkered down at his post, hidden by a creosote shrub, but he then made the great mistake of standing up and presenting a vague silhouette of himself against the white sand. I shot him squarely in the face and let out with a war cry—and the attack was on.

  We rode in yelling “Viva Villa!” and howling like hell’s own devils, circling through the streets of town, shooting at everything. A man came running out of a lighted house and several of us fired on him at the same time, sending him spinning back through the door in a spray of blood as bullets shattered the windows on either side of him.

  A huge slavering dog came bounding from the darkness, and as he rode by it, one of the boys slashed it nearly in two with a machete.

  I heard Villa’s boys charging into the army camp on the other side of the tracks, shooting and shouting. The camp was bursting awake in a panicked confusion of outcries and wild commands and sporadic return fire.

  While some of the boys attacked the married officers’ houses scattered around town—their job was to keep those officers pinned down and out of the fight—I dismounted and hobbled into the Ravels’ general store, followed by a dozen men. According to our spies, the brothers’ living quarters were in the back rooms. A light was burning in the front section of the store and I went in with both pistols cocked but found nobody there. I rushed to the rear rooms and saw that they were living quarters all right, but no one was there either. As soon as they heard us ride in, they must’ve flown out the back door. I shot up their beds and mirrors for the hell of it, then went back to the front room. The boys were looting the place and loading it on a pair of mule-drawn wagons they’d pulled up out front.

  Just as I stepped out on the sidewalk, a gunshot blasted from my left and one of the boys in the wagon grunted and pitched into the street. I whirled and fired twice and killed the shooter—a soldier hunkering at the corner of the building. I stripped him of his .45 automatic and his pistol belt and magazine pouches, then headed for the Commercial Hotel to look for the Ravels, taking a few of the boys with me. The others went on plundering the stores and shooting at every window that showed light.

  Several men watched us from the windows of the lighted lobby as we approached. One of them opened fire with a rifle and took down the boy on my right. We charged through the doors shooting and killed the rifleman and another man beside him—both of them in nightshirts. We shot at the others as they scrambled out the back doors, but none of them dropped. A man in a vest appeared on the second-floor landing, blasting at us with an old-fashioned cap-and-ball Colt and hitting one of the boys in the neck. Somebody shot him in the stomach and he fell on his ass. I finished him with three quick shots as I clumped up the stairs. I marveled at the .45’s smooth action. The first one I’d ever seen was Urbina’s, but it was constantly jamming on him, so I hadn’t been too impressed. This one was a work of art.

  We went down the hallway, breaking open the doors to the rooms, terrifying the occupants, but found no sign of the Ravels. One man came at me swinging a water pitcher, so I gave him a bullet in the eye. A woman in the bed screamed and screamed, and I was tempted to shoot her too, just to shut her up, but one of the boys backhanded her across the mouth and that did the job. He gave her tit a squeeze and laughed at the look on her face.

  When I got back downstairs, the hotel was on fire. So were several other buildings on the street. Villa had given orders not to set any fires till we began our retreat—fire would illuminate us and make us better targets—but some of the boys got all caught up in the thrill of the raid and just had to begin burning things.

  The gringos were starting to form up their defenses now. The intensity of the shooting across the tracks told me the Yankee camp was putting up a better fight than we’d expected. Some of the troopers were coming across the tracks and taking up positions along the street. Gunfire was cracking and flashing everywhere. Now a machine gun opened up on us. Horses screamed and men went down. We were stark silhouettes against the flaming buildings. I mounted up and reined my horse around just as a bullet thumped into his side and one whacked into my wooden leg. He bucked wildly and threw me, then staggered in a circle as more rounds hit him, and then his legs broke under him like straws.

  A riderless horse came loping by and I tried to catch hold of its reins but I missed my grab and went sprawling again. Then a spunky little pinto trotted right up like he’d been looking for me, and I swung up on his back.

  A deep rumble of hooves rose from the far end of the camp. Villa and his bunch had gotten the army horses out of the stables and were lighting out with them. Some of my boys were still loadin
g the wagons with goods from the stores, and I hollered, “Go! Let’s go!” They jumped into the wagons and lashed the mules into action, heading back the way we’d come in.

  I set out behind them—but as I rode through the intersection of the main road and the railroad tracks, my pony was hit and down we went, the pinto shrieking as I rolled clear of him.

  I got up fast, looking around for another horse, bullets buzzing by my head and snatching at my clothes. A wagon came clattering from behind the railroad depot, pulled by four huge, wild-eyed mules and drawing a fury of rifle fire. Pablo López was driving the team, hunkered low, popping a whip and laughing like a crazy man. He saw me and slowed the rig enough for me to grab on to the seat beside him and pull myself up as he laid into the whip again. We bounced and swayed past the custom-house with bullets hammering into the munitions cases stacked in the wagon bed.

  “They cut off the camp’s back road!” Pablo yelled. “Had to turn this rig around and drive it right through the middle of those fuckers!” He stood up and looked over his shoulder, grinning fiercely, then shook the whip high over his head and yelled, “Fuck your mothers, gringos! Viva Villa!”

  A machine gun chattered over the cracking of the rifles, its rounds punching into the gun cases—and then Pablo cried out and collapsed into the back of the wagon.

  I grabbed up the reins and whipped the team on, driving us away from the fires of Columbus and into the darkness of the open desert.

  •

  We flew across the border and didn’t stop till the next afternoon when we got to the Mormon settlement at Colonia Dublan. There we tended the wounded and took on supplies. A posse of gringo troopers had chased us fifteen miles into Mexico—but there were only about thirty of them, and they turned and ran for home when some of our boys dropped back to give them a fight.

  Our casualties were twenty-nine wounded and thirty-one missing. It turned out ten of the missing had been taken prisoner. They would be tried for murder and hanged in a Yankee jail. The gringos lied as always and said they’d killed a hundred of us. They burned the bodies out in the desert before anyone else could make a true count. The fact is, we’d kicked their ass and they damn well knew it. We killed some twenty of them, about half of them soldiers, and we could’ve had a higher tally if we hadn’t been a lot more interested in getting weapons and horses than in killing gringos.

  Even so, we’d ridden into the United States and into the heart of a Yankee army camp and shot the hell out of them and taken three hundred rifles and dozens of boxes of ammunition. We even got a machine gun. We got eighty-five horses and twenty-five mules. And of course a whole lot of loot—blankets, tinned food, and so on.

  Hell, what we’d really done was make history. Us. We happy bastard few. The friends of Pancho Villa. Damned right!

  We headed to one of our favorite hiding places in the high sierras—a fine camping spot just west of Guerrero. We traveled by mountain routes all the way, which was slower than by the valley trails, but better for avoiding federal scouting parties or spies who might report our whereabouts to the gringos.

  We had no doubts the gringos would be sending soldiers after us. Carranza wouldn’t be able to talk them out of it, not this time. “Let’s see how well the Yankees and their good friend Señor Whitebeard get along now,” Villa said.

  •

  Our progress on the mountain trails would have been even slower if Pablo López hadn’t chosen to go his own way. He’d been hit in both legs and couldn’t even stand without help. We’d stanched the bleeding, but every jolt of the wagon he lay in knotted his jaws and brought more sweat to his face. He knew he was slowing us down, and when we stopped to water the animals at the Río Santa Marta before turning west, he told Villa he wanted to go home. His family lived in a little pueblo only a dozen miles from where we were. He chose two trusted compadres to transport him in the wagon and promised to be healed and ready to rejoin us by the end of spring.

  A few weeks later, Candelario Cervantes, one of the two compadres who’d gone with him, showed up at our hideout with a sad tale to tell. They’d gotten Pablo home all right, and his wounds had been cleaned and treated and properly bandaged. But to spare the villagers trouble with Carranza’s federals, who were patrolling the region, Pablo had his two friends take him away to a secret cave where he’d often before hidden from pursuers. Once they got there, Pablo sent Ernesto, the other friend, back to the village for supplies.

  Two days later here came Ernesto at the head of a column of federals making their way up the mountain toward the cave. Pablo ordered Candelario to make his escape while he had the chance, but Candelario refused to abandon him. Not until Pablo argued that one of them had to remain free in order to take revenge on Ernesto did Candelario agree to get away. He slipped off into the heavy brush and circled back down to the village. There he learned from Pablo’s family that someone had sent word to a passing federal troop that Pablo was hiding nearby. The federals had come quickly, and when Ernesto showed up for supplies, they arrested him and threatened to shoot him if he did not lead them to Pablo’s hiding place.

  The man suspected of informing on Pablo, Candelario was told, was a wheelwright named Mendoza who had always hated Pablo for stealing his sweetheart from him when they were boys. Although they weren’t absolutely sure Mendoza was the one, Candelario sneaked into his house that night and cut his throat.

  “Even if Mendoza wasn’t the one,” he told us, “I figured it was a good idea to let everyone see what happens to informers.” Villa agreed and commended him for his morally instructive action.

  A couple of days after leading the federals to Pablo, Ernesto returned to the village and was received by silent, angry faces. Candelario was waiting for him in the cantina. ‘‘I expected you to be here,” Ernesto said, “when I saw you were gone from the cave.” He said Pablo had not given him a chance to explain things and had spit in his face when the federals carried him down from his hiding place. The soldiers had taken him to Chihuahua City to stand trial as a bandit. “I had no choice, compadre,” he told Candelario. “They would have killed me. You understand.”

  Candelario said he surely did understand—and then shot Ernesto five times in the heart. The villagers didn’t even bury him. They threw his carcass out for the dogs to feed on in an arroyo.

  By the time Candelario arrived in Chihuahua City, Pablo had been tried and convicted and sentenced to death. The next morning a huge crowd gathered in the main yard of the military garrison to watch the execution. Pablo was brought out in a wagon and helped to stand on his crutches in front of the wall. When he was asked if he had last words, he said he wanted to know if there were any gringos in the crowd. The spectators instantly pointed them out—“Here! Here’s a gringo!’’ and “Over here! Over here!”

  There were two Yankees present, and Pablo demanded that they be removed from the garrison yard. “I won’t permit a gringo to watch me die!” he yelled—and the crowd cheered and applauded, crying out, “Death to all gringos!” The Yankees might have been killed by the mob, Candelario said, if the soldiers hadn’t acted quickly to get them out of the yard.

  When the gringos were removed from the scene, Pablo said he was ready. The captain of the firing squad ordered, “Ready! . . . Aim! . . .” and Pablo dropped his crutches, spread his arms wide, and shouted “Viva Villa!” in the instant before the rifles fired.

  FIFTEEN

  A week after we hit Columbus the gringos sent an army of ten thousand men into Mexico to find us and kill us. They called it a “punitive expedition,” and their commander was the lean general with the little iron mustache, John J. Pershing, the one they called Black Jack. Our scouts said they were moving due south in two columns about fifty miles apart. They were coming on horses, wagons, motor vehicles, even on airplanes. But the flying machines were having trouble in the sandy desert winds, and already one of them had crashed. A couple of our scouts saw it happe
n, and they never got tired of describing its spectacular spiraling fall and fireball impact with the ground.

  The Yankees posted a reward for Villa’s capture. Five thousand dollars. The newspapers said it would be paid for him “dead or alive.” Pancho was astonished at the sum. “So many dollars,” he said, “for one little head so full of ignorance. They are so rich, those people, but they know the worth of nothing.”

  Naturally, Carranza had tried to talk the gringos out of intervention. The bastard actually tried to make them believe that our raid was proof of his government’s great success against us—that the reason we’d crossed into the U.S. was to escape his troops, who he claimed had been shooting us down like dogs all over northern Mexico. Our attack on the U.S., he said, was clearly a desperate ploy to try to “ignite friction” between the two countries and destroy the “stability” he had brought to Mexico—as though anybody with a pair of eyes couldn’t see that most of the country was still in chaos. He promised that his army would use “the most vigorous tactics” to hunt down Villa and “avenge his horrible crimes.”

  The gringo government said, ‘‘Yes . . . certainly . . . of course”—and sent their soldiers anyway. The whitebeard sputtered a lot of protests but there wasn’t much he could do except deny them the use of Mexican railroads.

  The Yankees had as much chance of finding Villa in the Sierra Madres as a blind man has of finding gold dust in a sand dune. Pancho had grown up in these mountains and could move through them like a cougar. The people of the region still revered him and would be of as little help to the gringo scouts as they were to the Carrancistas. A telegrapher in Chihuahua City told us of the local garrison commander’s frustration in searching for Villa: the general sent a wire to the whitebeard, saying, “I have the honor to inform you that through rigorous interrogation of the local populace I have learned beyond doubt that the bandit Francisco Villa is most certainly dead and buried and very much alive and well, and that at this very moment he is to be found everywhere and nowhere.”